I provide independent research of technology companies and was previously one of two analysts that determined the technology holdings for Atlantic Trust (Invesco's high net worth group), a firm with $15 billion under management. Before joining Atlantic Trust I was the Internet Security Software analyst for Smith Barney (where I authored the most comprehensive industry report “Internet Security Software: The Ultimate Internet Infrastructure”) and an Enterprise Server Hardware analyst at Salomon Brothers. Prior to becoming an equity analyst, I spent 16 years at IBM in a variety of sales and manufacturing positions. I have a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University and a Postgraduate Diploma in Economics from the University of Sussex, England.

Total mobile phones shipped in the quarter were 482.5 million vs. 473.4 million a year ago, an increase of only 2%. That means that feature phones fell from 312.6 million to 263.1 million, a decline of 16% year over year.

Samsung was the clear winner shipping an estimated 63.7 million smartphones, up 76% year over year, vs. Apple at 47.8 million, up 29%. Huawei, Sony and ZTE all posted strong gains with Huawei and ZTE doing well in the mass market and focused on moving up into higher priced phones.

Samsung’s smartphone market share increased from 23% in the December 2011 quarter to 29%. Apple’s fell from 23% to 22% but given that it does not participate in lower priced smartphones that isn’t too bad of a showing. Huawei showed up as a top 5 vendor for the first time and the “Others” took the biggest hit with HTC falling out of the top 5.

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